Today's extract from What do we mean by local?* is by Fran Collingham, assistant director with responsibility for the communications service at Coventry city council.

She began her career as a journalist, working as a reporter and sub-editor on local weekly and daily newspapers in the Midlands, before switching to local government PR in the mid-1990s...

It's easy to argue that the growth of social media has turned us all into citizen journalists with the ability to make the news whoever and wherever we are.

What's simpler than taking a picture of something exciting on your mobile phone and emailing it to the local paper? Why not share your frustrations with the failings of a big organisation by blogging about their woeful service and lack of customer care? And Twitter gives us all an instant platform to tell hundreds of people in a moment what's going on in our world.

So why bother buying a local newspaper (or listening to the local radio station) when the news is out there in the digital world for us all to share and contribute to, updated constantly, and without a cover price?

The best local newspapers are embracing this challenge, and proving that in a world where there are a million views and interpretations of the news at the touch of a button residents, more than ever, need their local media to make sense of the digital cacophony around them.

What was the first thing Gandhi would suggest for a village? Setting up a newspaper, a central point through which all the news is filtered and which brings the people together. It may be he didn't have to deal with Twitter inthose days but even so, he saw the careful and controlled dissemination of local news as being vital to the thriving heart of any society.

Making sense of so much information

Ironically, it's the very abundance of information and news now available to everyone that makes the role of the local newspaper even more important.

Councils like mine publish every item of expenditure over £500 on our websites for anyone to examine. We webcast council meetings and we Tweet results from planning committee meetings. All our agendas, reportsand minutes are available online.

Residents with a view about our services can share these views through websites, blogs, the discussion forums on local news websites and (of course) via Twitter.

We put out our own magazines. We embrace every kind of news channel there is because we want everyone to know everything. It is public, it is transparent and it is honest.

So the raw data is there in a way it's never been before. And while there are people around in every town and city making sense of this data and using it to prompt questions and debate about policies and initiatives, local journalists are the most important in interpreting what's really going on in their communities and explaining it to their readers.

That means making sense of a huge range of differing views about an issue, doing it quickly and knowing the right questions to ask of the right people at the right time.

That's what decent reporters have always done, of course, but now a lot of their work is as transparent and accessible as the data public organizations like councils routinely publish.

It's likely that a tweet that's worthy of a follow-up by a reporter has been seen by hundreds of us at the same time as the reporter first spotted it. So readers of the next day's paper may not be surprised by the story born from the original tweet, but they do want to know if it was really true and, if so, what it means for them.

Local people do, on the whole, still trust their local newspaper (more than they trust the national media) to tell them what's really going on in their neighbourhood, and at a time when they can choose hundreds of different sources that can give them a version of what's going locally, the role of a local newspaper in sorting out the nonsense from the real story is absolutely vital.

That's as much of a challenge for councils like mine as it is for the local media. Despite the occasional fallings-outs and tussles that go on when a feisty newspaper takes the biggest organisation in town to task (that's usually thecouncil), I've never met a councillor who hasn't recognised the importance the local media plays in ensuring local democracy is alive and well in the community.

They know reporting of their actions and decisions in the local media will be replayed and questioned in their wards and on the doorsteps of their constituents at election time, and they're up for the public scrutiny that goes with making decisions that affect the people who voted them into power.

Many local politicians are embracing social media as a different way of connecting with their voters, and understand this is much more than a two-way conversation with individual residents.

Views in a tweet, or on a local councillor's blog probably aren't worthy of a press release, but knowing that a reporter is keeping an eye on all your interactions with the public on Twitter or online should – and often does – focus the mind pretty sharply.

Papers are best at holding councils to account

Councils around the country are seeing social media as a new way of having honest conversations with citizens, but it would be a foolish council that believes this will replace the scrutiny offered by a decent local newspaper.

In Coventry we've won national awards for our use of Facebook and Twitter. More than 20,000 people like our Facebook pages and we know that when it comes to putting out urgent direct messages (your school is closed because of the snow, we're gritting the roads tonight because it's icy) we're reaching more people more quickly than ever before.

We've also experimented with using online, live debate forums as a way of gathering opinions on the future of our city. But we did this with our local media; BBC Coventry and Warwickshire covered the launch of the first online debate and the Coventry Telegraph's editor took part in it.

And we knew the experiment was a success when the newspaper took an interest in one of the issues and turned it into a story.

We're keen to continue innovating in social media, but it's hard to see how it could replace the role of a local newspaper in holding us to account, questioning our decisions and helping its readers understand our policies.

Like every ex-journalist I mourn the passing of the days when everyone had the local paper delivered through their letterbox at teatime. I'd rather read my news in a paper than online, and I think the nibs at the back of the paper about a WI raffle are as much to be treasured as the violent crime story that's made the front page.

That world is fast disappearing – if it hasn't already – and I think towns and cities are poorer places as a result. But while there are still local newspapers around trying to make sense of the places they cover then, tweet it quietly, there's still life in the old newshounds yet.

Next: The director of the Society of Editors, Bob Satchwell, argues that local newspapers have many years of life left in them yet

*What do we mean by local? is edited by John Mair, Neil Fowler & Ian Reeves and published by Abramis. Available at a special Media Guardian price of £12 from richard@arimapublishing.co.uk